> it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit I don't think that's correct, people simply love to extrapolate beyond the evide

> it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit I don't think that's correct, people simply love to extrapolate beyond the evidence. You do a study where you take 6 grad student and tell them to push a button that sends electricity (supposedly) to a subject. You measure their behavior in that context. Okay, you've got a pretty small sample of something. Now here comes the non-scientific part, a professor looking for fame and glory, a bunch of news site looking for clicks and views, and you get an article: "Science proves that people are willing to hurt others on command if told it is for an experiment." See, the thing is that science is about slowly acquiring more knowledge and understanding and updating our mental models and understanding of things as more information shows up. Here the experiment wasn't useless, it tells us one small extra bit of info we didn't have before. Doing experiments, testing hypothesis, those are still valuable. Extrapolating the result of those to mean more than they demonstrate is just a follow up hypothesis that then itself needs an experiment, etc.